Davemichels

You know how to make sure a government agency — or if you are a government agency, then Wikileaks — won't eventually read everything you type? By dumping your laptop and clacking the keys on something like an old-fashioned Selectric, then hand-delivering the result to your correspondent

That appears to be the rationale behind the Russian government's decision to purchase new typewriter equipment. The country's Federal Guard Agency has placed an order for 486,000 roubles worth of electric typewriters, according to the Russian procurement service website

SEE ALSO: 10 Terrific Tech Accessories That Celebrate the Typewriter Read more...

More about Typewriters, Typewriter, Tech, and Gadgets

Two House Democrats pitched legislation this week that would establish a national park on the moon

Reps. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) proposed creating the Apollo Lunar Landing Sites National Historic Park to safeguard the artifacts left behind from NASA's Apollo missions 11 through 17.

"The Apollo Lunar Landing Legacy Act will ensure that the scientific data and cultural significance of the Apollo artifacts remains unharmed by future lunar landings," Rep. Edwards said in her introduction of the bill. "This Act will endow the artifacts as a National Historic Park, thereby asserting unquestioned ownership rights over the Apollo lunar landing artifacts." Read more...

More about Space, Nasa, Moon, National Parks, and Us World

"Give me your phone!"

"No! Give me your password!"

"Just give me your phone!"

"Just tell me your password again!"

"I told you three times, already!"

This exact scene has played out several times in my house. The conversation has even more looping subroutines when it involves my parents. No one, it seems, can type in my complicated password on their tiny smartphone touchscreens. At least, not on the first or second try. 

That is about to change: I will no longer have a password on my home Wi-Fi.

You're welcome.

A Win For The Sharing Economy

The first thing that friends and family ask when they visit is: "What's your Wi-Fi password?" No more. Now, anyone who enters my home—or ventures nearby—will have instant, unfettered access to all the World Wide Web has to offer.

With my move to the tourist mecca that is San Francisco, I expect more guests and visitors, all of whom will probably ask to use my Wi-Fi with less bashfulness than they ask to use the bathroom.

I don't make houseguests sign in before "consuming" my water, electricity or heat. If neighbors need to borrow something—a cup of sugar, perhaps, or my lawnmower—they are welcome, no signature required. Why not bandwidth? My monthly cost for high-speed Internet is probably less than the value I receive as a homeowner by having happy neighbors who keep well-tended homes and look out for one another.

Perhaps my simple act of sharing will improve life in the neighborhood, if just a little.

Consider leaving my Wi-Fi network open my part in enabling the "sharing economy."  

Not Afraid Of The Bad Guys

I am not terribly concerned that "hackers" will somehow discover I have a unsecured connection and use it for nefarious deeds. 

Hackers already have access to bandwidth. Are they really going to show up in my neighborhood, where retirees seem to love nothing more than to putter outside during the day? Watchful neighborhood eyes peering out the windows late at night are more likely to expose a hacker that any network security tools I can install.

My Wi-Fi network password contains—or once did—a capital letter, several numbers and a symbol. It's unlikely the bad guys are even slowed down by this. Just last month, for example, we learned that the password that Apple generates for establishing an iPhone hotspot is, well, apparently very easy to crack:

According to researchers at Germany's University of Erlangen, the way that the (iPhone) keys are generated—with a combination of a short English word along with random numbers—is predictable to the point where the researchers are able to crack the hotspot password in less than a minute. 

Teenagers: Get Off My Virtual Lawn

The only good reason to lock access to my Wi-Fi: teenagers.

Nearly all teenagers have smartphones. The likelihood is that most have hard data caps for these devices. This means they rely on Wi-Fi for much of their streaming, photo uploading, video sharing, and general 24/7 connectivity.

Having a teenager of my own has made me acutely aware of how today's teens, fully and continuously connected to everyone on the planet via smartphone, have a legitimate problem contemplating the world beyond arm's length. If there's an open Wi-Fi connection available, odds are they will jump on, guilt-free and unconcerned about hogging some good Samaritan's bandwidth.

I'm no prude. Queries such as "Kate Upton nude video" or "guy who breaks leg on skateboard" don't upset me. Rather, I am a bit worried that a gaggle of bandwidth-devouring teens might put me in the crosshairs of my broadband provider's customer-service department. Or worse, their lawyers.

Somewhat Afraid Of The Lawyers

With my last network service provider, I (unknowingly) agreed to an "Acceptable Use Policy."  I have mightily edited their very direct stipulations. Acceptable use comes with numerous limits (my highlights in bold).

1. You agree not to use the Service for or in the pursuit of illegal purposes.
2. You agree not to directly or indirectly allow a third party to use the Service in an illegal or unsuitable manner.
3. You agree not to use the Service for harassment, threats, verbal abuse, and persistent unwanted contact of any kind.  
4. You agree not to post or transmit fraudulent information on or through the Service.  
5. You agree not to post or transmit any unsolicited material through any active medium such as email, chat, messaging, chain letters, advertisements, jokes, etc.  
6. You agree not to post or transmit any disruptive content. This can include, but is not limited to, material that is considered obscene, offensive, or extremely controversial.  
7. This Service is intended for personal, periodic, and active use of the World Wide Web, email, news groups, games and file transfers; You may stay connected so long as You are using the Service for this purpose.  
8. You will not use continued and sustained excessive bandwidth as defined by the TDS Terms of Service in connection with Your use of the Service. 
9. You may not resell the Service or redistribute or reconfigure the Service to allow others to use the Service in an illegal, fraudulent or inappropriate manner.
10. Interpretation will be at the sole discretion of TDS.

Can I trust my neighbors—and their children—to abide by the rules I have signed up for? Always? 

Honestly, I don't know. I am prepared to take that risk, however. Somebody has to start this.

Pay It Forward

In fact, it seems that a movement toward open access has already begun. At least, in baby steps. 

Last month, Comcast unveiled a plan where its Xfinity home routers will provide Wi-Fi service to the paying customer's home at the same time that it broadcasts public access to Wi-Fi. (The router will partition the two networks so the public doesn't have access to the customer's local network.)

Access to "roaming" Xfinity customers will be offered free. "Guests" are offered two hours per month for free—with the option to pay for additional hours. Comcast says this plan will not affect paying customers' access or bandwidth.

It's not just service providers. Apple's new AirPort Extreme, the company's pricey new Wi-Fi router, lists "guest networking" as one of its core benefits:

With the guest networking feature, you can set up a separate Wi‑Fi network just for guests. Use a different password or no password at all. A guest network allows access only to the Internet, so your primary network — including any external hard drive, printer, or other LAN-attached device — remains secure.

And Apple's far from alone. There's a long list of routers that support guest networks. You just need to be willing to go through a brief setup process to configure your guest network—and you, too, can be out of the handing-out-passwords business.

A lot of places that used to charge for Wi-Fi are now offering it as a freebie. Connectivity is becoming as indispensable for a business as bathroom facilities, possibly as important as heating and air conditioning. Starbucks, which used to charge, went free years ago. I suspect these venues are realizing that it costs far more to collect payment and handle customer support than to simply offer this amenity—which, by the way, makes it easier to use their mobile apps and services. Target and Macy's are offering free Wi-Fi: If you can't find something in their stores, you'll order it online, on your phone—but probably on their online stores, which are heavily promoted when you log in. It turns out there's money in this free Wi-Fi idea.

The Power Of Networking

If businesses can treat their customers—"guests," as Target likes to call them—this well, why can't we treat our actual guests as hospitably when we invite them into our homes?

A guy named Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet, the networking protocol that powers Wi-Fi. He also coined Metcalfe's Law, which says that "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system."

That sounds good, though I can't see what direct value I'll get by opening up my Wi-Fi. I just know that I get to be a good host, and cut out one everyday hassle. The network will take care of itself, if we just drop this pointless barrier. 

Images courtesy of Flickr user angermann, Wikimedia and Apple

We're entering the tech doldrums—that time after Apple, Google, and Microsoft have held their big conferences and Samsung, Nokia, and the rest have done their big product reveals. In a few months, we'll be speculating about what will be the hot holiday products.

But right now is when I like to take stock of those things that still irritate me as a technology user. Rather than shove more products down our throats, why can't they just make the current ones we have work right? In an era when so much is done in software rather than hardware, and updates flow over high-speed networks, there's just no reason why giant tech companies can't fix these problems. 

I'm not a complainer by disposition: I try to balance the list of things that drive me up the wall with the feeling of wonder that I get from the some of the new great things that I have found. It gives me a little perspective and puts a smile on my face when I push away from my desk and head out for a beach walk. But I thought it would be helpful to share what's bothered me—maybe these oversights, errors, or bad decisions bother you, too.

Here's my summer 2013 list of tech misdeeds.

Email Attachments

People still send me full-sized pictures by email. It is by far the worst offense and has held that spot for years. With all the options out there for viewing and sharing pictures on the Web, no one needs multimegabyte copies of photos.

Who should fix this: Apple, Microsoft, and Google all make email clients and have file-sharing services. They should mash them up and make file-sharing links, not raw file attachments, the default behavior. Now, Google does allow Google Drive as a sharing option; Microsoft does likewise with SkyDrive. But Apple is AWOL on this issue, and neither Google nor Microsoft does enough to educate users about this option.

Should the services themselves not step up, I'd love to see file-sharing service Dropbox and its recent Mailbox acquisition to swoop in and fix the problem. 

Facebook Messages

Following closely with large images in my inbox is expecting me to respond to a Facebook message in a timely fashion. It just makes no sense. I have no shortage of real email addresses. There is absolutely no Facebook link on my real emails, and unless Facebook is the only way you do electronic messaging, you can be certain that you have never gotten a Facebook message from me. There are a lot of ways to get my attention. Facebook just isn’t one of them.

Who should fix this: This one's on Mark Zuckerberg & Co. He keeps promising to reinvent and simplify email. How about a simple way to opt out of Facebook messaging altogether and redirect any messages people try to send via Facebook to my inbox?

Digital Downloads

In November 2010, I decided to upgrade my Adobe Dreamweaver Web-authoring software. I had lost my most recent serial number, but I had an online chat with an Adobe representative who assured me that everything would work. As soon as I bought the product and downloaded it, I found it wouldn’t work. The rep dropped the chat and told me I would have to talk to support. That was the wrong answer. Adobe eventually fixed the problem with a new copy of Dreamweaver. In a box. Sent by FedEx to my house.

Who should fix this: Hopefully this problem's in the past, as Adobe's now pushing its online Creative Cloud as a replacement for old-fashioned desktop software installs. But moving software to the cloud means you can't mess around with activation codes, logins, and permissions. 

Clouds That Go Poof

Another cloud conundrum: Telling me that my data is safe with you and then pulling the rug out from under me. Apple, are you listening? I have lived through .Mac and MobileMe. I will not be taken in by iCloud. I am pretty sure that I still have links out there which go to now non-existent things that were once hosted by Apple.

Who should fix this: Maybe consumers should vote with their wallets and take their business elsewhere when companies drop cloud services. Or maybe we need some kind of regulation. At the very least, we should more actively shame companies like Apple when they do this. The creator of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has declared that it's not cool to change links or make them disappear. More people should listen to him.

Sneakware

Companies keep trying to slip in an unwanted product with a product that I wanted until you tried to trick me. I gave up on Java just because I hated having to wait to tell Oracle that I did not want whatever toolbar they were peddling. ZDNet's Ed Bott calls this "foistware"—software that's foisted on unsuspecting users. I call it "sneakware."

Who should fix this: Oracle seems to be the main holdout, with past offenders like Skype mending their ways. (I started to give Adobe props for doing likewise, but just this morning found it trying to foist an unwanted toolbar on me while I was upgrading Flash. Bah.)

Mobile Junkware

In the age of app stores, there's no reason why carriers and handset makers should be installing apps for us. Yet they do—and worse, it seems to work to help them sell phones. I don't get it. All I see are apps that I do not want and will never use. Trust me—if the app has “NFL” in its name, I do not need it.

But what are my alternatives? Apple does a great job stopping carriers from installing software on the iPhone, but I don't want to go the iPhone route. In the Android world, there's the Nexus, with just Google's basic Android setup—but when I tried to buy it through Verizon, I couldn't.

Who should fix this: For consumers like me, carriers and handset makers should at least offer a no-apps option. I might even pay a little extra not to get them.

Upgrades That Force Updates

Why do computer makers force me to move to a new version of my desktop applications—often, one that requires buying a paid upgrade or a new version—just because I got a new version of an operating system preinstalled on a new computer? I have lost count of the times this has happened to me. Of course this is the way our tech industry operates, but it feels like extortion. That is why I spend more and more time using Linux.

Who should fix this: There's no reason why desktop apps shouldn't just update over the network automatically, like mobile apps do. Fortunately, Apple and Microsoft seem to be learning from the mobile world, moving to app-store models of automatic updates on the desktop, too. 

iLemons

Remember my "iLemon" experience with my iMac? Telling me you are going to solve my problem and explaining you cannot fix the exact problem which I told you I had in the first place is just unacceptable. And you shouldn't need a fancy extended warranty to get problems rooted in manufacturing fixed.

Who should fix this: Apple and other PC makers should expand the kinds of problems they'll fix under a basic warranty, and extend the warranty periods—without extra charges.

The Dreaded Reboot

Rebooting my computer without my permission just should not happen. Microsoft loves to do this.

Almost as bad: Windows tells me that I cannot turn my computer off at the most inopportune time because it has to install updates.

Who should fix this: This one's entirely on Redmond.

Unsupported Hardware

Yes, I get that computer companies want to make money by selling new hardware. But a lot of organizations get by with old, donated equipment—like schools, churches, and nonprofits. I tried to set up my son's old Apple AirPort Express Wi-Fi router at our church. The AirPort utility on my Mac didn't work to set it up. Apple's support forums referenced "Apple's non-existent solution" to the problem. I found a workaround: Apple's version of the AirPort software for Windows 7 still worked. Apple isn’t the only one guilty of this type of stuff, but they are a very good poster child.

Who should fix this: This seems like a basic fairness issue, since it's the people and organizations with the least resources who are often stuck using older gear. Every tech company should support old hardware and software as long as it can.

It's Not All Bad

I thought I'd have more complaints, but this list isn't nearly as long as I thought it would be. Most of this stuff has been happening to me for so long that it's like water off a duck’s back.

Still, it would be nice if tech companies focused on fixing these everyday grievances of ordinary users, rather than rushing out a bunch of new gadgets and services—all of which will likely have their own bugs, defects, and annoyances—before the summer break.

Even so, I haven't lost my appreciation for what new technology brings. One small example: I was able to watch and comment the other night in real time on Google Docs as my editor worked on one of my submissions. For me, the wonder still outweighs the irritants. But I sure feel better getting these complaints off my chest.

Images via the film "Office Space"

Microsoft’s cooperation with the National Security Agency isn’t quite as extensive as the latest in the Guardian’s series of reports on U.S. electronic surveillance efforts claims. This according to the software giant itself, which issued a statement Friday denying that it had helped the NSA circumvent its own encryption systems in order to monitor audio, video and email communications across services like Skype and Outlook.

“Microsoft does not provide any government with blanket or direct access to SkyDrive, Outlook.com, Skype or any Microsoft product,” the company said in a response to the Guardian’s report, which detailed its participation in the NSA’s Prism surveillance program. Based on documents provided to the publication by Edward Snowden, that report claimed Microsoft not only gave the NSA pre-encryption stage access to Outlook.com email, but helped it monitor its Skype video chat and SkyDrive cloud storage services, as well.

Microsoft — ironically, still in the midst of a big “Your privacy is our priority” marketing campaign — disputes those allegations, but only to a point. Like other big tech companies mired in this surveillance controversy, it claims it only provides the NSA with access to customer data “in response to legal processes.”

“We have clear principles which guide the response across our entire company to government demands for customer information for both law enforcement and national security issues,” Microsoft said. “We only ever comply with orders about specific accounts or identifiers, and we would not respond to the kind of blanket orders discussed in the press over the past few weeks.”

That’s a principled bit of reassurance, but it’s largely empty without hard information about the legal queries Microsoft fields and how it handles them. And unfortunately for Microsoft, it can’t really comment further, thanks to gag orders and other legal restrictions on such disclosures — though it says it really would like to.

“There are aspects of this debate that we wish we were able to discuss more freely,” Microsoft said. “That’s why we’ve argued for additional transparency that would help everyone understand and debate these important issues.”

Below, Microsoft’s statement in full:

In response to an article in the Guardian on July 11, Microsoft issued the following statement:

“We have clear principles which guide the response across our entire company to government demands for customer information for both law enforcement and national security issues.

First, we take our commitments to our customers and to compliance with applicable law very seriously, so we provide customer data only in response to legal processes. Second, our compliance team examines all demands very closely, and we reject them if we believe they aren’t valid. Third, we only ever comply with orders about specific accounts or identifiers, and we would not respond to the kind of blanket orders discussed in the press over the past few weeks, as the volumes documented in our most recent disclosure clearly illustrate. To be clear, Microsoft does not provide any government with blanket or direct access to SkyDrive, Outlook.com, Skype or any Microsoft product.

Finally when we upgrade or update products legal obligations may in some circumstances require that we maintain the ability to provide information in response to a law enforcement or national security request. There are aspects of this debate that we wish we were able to discuss more freely. That’s why we’ve argued for additional transparency that would help everyone understand and debate these important issues.”

New Century Global Center The New Century Global Center is officially the largest freestanding building in the world. At 1.7 million square meters, the New Century Global Center is capable of housing the equivalent of 20 Sydney Opera Houses. (Photos) New Century, which has been under construction since spring of 2012 (which isn’t long, for [...]

Verizon is obligated to sell $23.5 billion worth of iPhones this year under the terms of its 2010 agreement with Apple. Should the carrier fall short of that goal, it could find itself on the hook for billions of dollars in payments to Apple. And with demand for the device more sluggish than expected this year, Verizon may well find itself in that unpleasant situation.

That’s the theory put forth by former Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Craig Moffett, who recently spent some time chewing through Verizon’s 20-F filings with the SEC. According to Moffett’s reading of those documents, Verizon must this year somehow sell double the number of iPhones it sold last year to meet its multiyear purchase commitment to Apple. And he’s not confident that will happen, since each year Verizon has come in below the prior year’s iPhone commitment. And if that’s the way things play out, the carrier could owe Apple somewhere between $12 billion and $14 billion.

Which would make for an uncomfortable situation at both companies. So, what might Apple do?

“It isn’t clear that Apple has any incentive to blow up [its Verizon] relationship by taking a hard line, nor is it likely that Apple would wish to advertise that … large partners are falling, or will fall, so far short of their purchase obligations,” Moffett writes. “Still, it is likely that Apple would be reluctant to simply ignore these commitments, since many other carriers around the world are likely in a similar boat and a simple amnesty would set an unwanted precedent.”

That’s a reasonable conclusion. It’s hard to imagine Apple allowing a shortfall like that to slide, should it occur. But how will it handle concessions, when disclosing them acknowledges slowing sales of a flagship product?

Verizon declined comment on Moffett’s theory.

When BlackBerry finally gets around to the next round of layoffs it is reportedly plotting, it can dial back its head-count reduction, thanks to a pair of employees who have taken matters into their own hands.

Sources close to BlackBerry tell AllThingsD that T.A. McCann — the company’s VP of product strategy for BlackBerry Messenger and founder of Gist, the social contacts service it purchased in 2011 — left last month. Departing at approximately the same time: Marc Gingras, founder of Tungle.me, the social calendaring outfit BlackBerry acquired in April 2011, and a key player in the development of the company’s new BlackBerry 10 operating system. It’s not clear why McCann and Gingras left. One source said they’d “simply had it” with BlackBerry’s ongoing struggles. Another chalked their departures up to an “entrepreneurial itch.”

BlackBerry confirmed to AllThingsD that McCann and Gingras are no longer with the company, and said their departures were amicable.

The loss of two such key employees adds to the widening eddy of bad news swirling around BlackBerry these days. Last month, the company reported quarterly results that fell far short of expectations, and worse, it predicted another operating loss for the current quarter. Not exactly hard evidence of the looming resurgence that BlackBerry’s leadership has been promising, though, to be fair, it is still in the early stages of a difficult transition, as CEO Thorsten Heins recently noted.

News of McCann’s and Gingras’s departures was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

No, iPhone screens are not magic. They are coated in a transparent material called indium tin oxide that senses when a finger makes contact.

ITO comes from the metal indium, which must be mined. Prices are rising as it becomes more scarce; the U.S. government estimates that from 2010 to 2011, the cost for indium rose by 25 percent. The world could run out altogether in the next decade.

To keep costs down, electronics manufacturers will need to look to alternative materials. At the Semicon West conference Wednesday in San Francisco, industry experts reported on potential alternatives such as carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires that could someday become the dominant touchscreen coating.

During his presentation, Nanotech Biomachines CEO and CTO Will Martinez presented the audience with a transparent sheet covered in graphene — an emerging material made of a one-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms. He bent it back and forth to demonstrate its flexibility.

“Try this with ITO and ITO would be filled with cracks,” he said.

Rahul Gupta, senior director of business development at Cambrios Technologies, touted the features of his company’s silver nanowires. Nanowires can be any length but are 10,000 times skinnier than a human hair.

Unlike many emerging materials, silver nanowires are already used in a few laptops, e-ink devices and smartphones. But while the materials are cheap, processing them is not. He showed that silver nanowires and metal mesh, another alternative, can hit a “sweet spot” for transparency and conductivity. Silver nanowires have already been tested in a bendable e-ink display, when a display was bent 100,000 times without an impact on performance.

“It’s rock solid, steady,” Gupta said.

Gupta said requirements are changing for touchscreen coatings. They must now rival or top ITO in transparency and conductivity, plus be flexible and able to conform to curved surfaces. Meeting those requirements will be especially important as manufacturers adapt materials to the coming wave of wearable electronics and even 3D TVs.

Demand for touch sensitive devices is growing quickly, meaning manufacturers are racing to produce widely adopted ITO alternatives within the next few years. According to Cambrios, 1.4 billion smartphones will have touchscreens, compared to 531.9 million today. While far fewer laptops will have touchscreens, the demand for laptop touchscreens measured in square meters will soon rival phones. There will be 20 million square meters of laptop touchscreens by 2015, compared to 35 million square meters on phones.

Some manufacturers are already planning on incorporating ITO alternatives into their devices. Foxconn might begin using carbon nanotubes in the non-Apple devices it makes by the end of 2013, and Samsung is working on prototypes that use graphene, according to Martinez.

“There’s lots of R&D to be done though,” Martinez said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”

It’s not so much the statistics from its various mobile industry surveys that make Google’s new Databoard so cool, but the fact that they’re free, pretty and ready to use. It’s not going to put analyst or research firms out of business any time soon, but if I were in the business of charging hundreds to thousands of dollars for market research reports, I wouldn’t take Databoard too lightly either.

Here’s the service in a nutshell: Google has done a bunch of research into how people are using mobile devices, and now it has created a service where you can easily find the key data points from those studies and then share them or turn them into infographics. You can also just download the reports in their entirety. It’s remarkably simple and, in theory, remarkably useful.

I created the infographic here in about an hour, pretending I was someone in the food and restaurant industry (something on the top of my mind after recently writing about the need for data in that industry). We can quibble about the order of the data points or the number of them, but it was pretty easy to lay out a case for building a quality mobile site and investing in various forms of advertising designed to target mobile users either in the area, in the store or in front of their TVs. If I needed to produce a report in a hurry, this would be a good place to start.

Yeah, the infographic-building experience isn’t ideal, and the end product isn’t either — infographics by nature tend to be long, and Databoard’s are without annotations to explain why the various points matter for your purposes. (Although, you can easily just copy and paste the individual images into PowerPoint.) The fact that it’s Google, a company with a vested interest in promoting industries such as mobile, promoting its own data on these very topics is also a bit unappealing. But it’s the idea that matters.

I look at Databoard as part of a larger trend toward changing how we do market research. Elsewhere, companies such as Placed are collecting location data on the businesses people physically visit and letting subscribers drill down into it to find the points that matter to them. Firms like Dachis Group are using social media to gauge customer sentiment at a scale that focus groups and phone surveys never could. GigaOM Pro, our market research business, gives subscribers access to everything its analysts publish for $299 a year.

With Databoard, Google is trying to change visual experience of reading reports and also making it easier to reuse its data for your own purposes. The fact that it’s free is just icing on the cake. If it wanted to take this product even further, Google could incorporate interactive behavioral data tools like Trends, as well as reports from outside sources, and create a one-stop shop for finding market data that matters and turning it into reports.

Market data, it turns out, isn’t a lot different than any other types of data or the technologies for analyzing it. It’s getting better while also becoming easier and cheaper to come by, and is a lot easier to consume. These are trends that don’t bode well for the former data gatekeepers, who can’t keep selling the same data in the same format for the same premium price forever.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Pixsooz.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter
• 4 iPad apps to help wrangle data

If you want to look for the positive angle to the increasingly depressing PC market, here’s maybe the only one: in the second quarter of 2013, the 75.6 million PC shipped during the period only represents a 11.4 percent drop compared in the last year, compared to the worst-ever 14 percent year over year decrease achieved in the first quarter of this year. IDC published these numbers Wednesday in its Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker report for Q2 2013.

Now, obviously that’s still bad; it’s just slightly less bad than last quarter. Even Lenovo, which for the first time surpassed HP to become the world’s largest PC maker, still had a rough go of it with worldwide shipments during the quarter: it decreased 1.4 percent.

But all of the major PC brands saw much of the same, as this chart shows:

IDC pinned most of the blame on Microsoft’s struggles with converting traditional PC users to Windows 8 and customers’ growing preference for tablets over laptops and desktops, which has been the same story for several consecutive quarters:

The numbers reflect a market that is still struggling with the transition to touch-based systems running Windows 8 as well as justifying ultrabook prices in the face of economic pressures and competition from tablets and other devices.

The story in the U.S. was a bit better: PC makers’ shipments in total dropped off just 1.9 percent in the last year. Two bright spots were Dell and Lenovo, both of which were the only ones among the U.S. top five brands to see positive gains in shipments from the second quarter of last year.

Apple continued the holding pattern we saw start to develop last quarter. After years of positive growth for its Mac shipments, in the first quarter Apple saw its shipments shrink 7.5 percent, at least according to IDC. In Q2, its shipments were off just a half percent, or basically even, from a year ago.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ercwttmn via Compfight cc

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Takeaways from connected consumer’s second quarter
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

BlackBerry is on the mend and the company’s lousy first-quarter earnings should not be viewed as evidence that its long-term prospects are withering.

That was the theme of CEO Thorsten Heins’s remarks at BlackBerry’s annual meeting today, as he sought to reassure long-suffering shareholders shaken by the company’s latest financials. Short-term volatility does not belie future success, Heins said, reminding attendees that BlackBerry’s new devices haven’t been on the market for even six months yet.

“BlackBerry is still in the early phases of our transition,” Heins said. “This isn’t just the launch of a new product, but a whole new platform. While many will judge us on the basis of one quarter of a single product, we are not a devices-only company. … This is a long-term transition for the company.”

Heins said pretty much the same thing during the company’s last earnings call (what else is he supposed to say?), and there’s certainly merit to his “Rome wasn’t built in a day” argument. That said, it’s an open question as to whether “Rome” will ever be built in this case.

For BlackBerry to miss so badly on smartphone shipments in the first full quarter that its new BB10 phones were on sale doesn’t speak well to the company’s chances of mounting a successful comeback. But who knows. Maybe we are witnessing a long, slow slog toward reclaimed greatness. Certainly that’s the narrative Heins is putting forth.

“Our transformation is ongoing and it is in no way easy,” he said. “I can assure you we are pushing very, very hard to show improvement. … We’re doing the right things and we’re doing the things we said we’d do.”

Fair enough. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Patience and fortitude conquer all things.”

Of course, Emerson was never a BlackBerry shareholder.

This summer is turning out to be a hot one … for wireless news. AT&T just sent out a teaser email inviting us to “Get ready for what’s next in wireless” on July 16, and included a list of accolades for its 4G LTE network. While this won’t be an actual event, I expect the carrier will talk about its upcoming LTE-Advanced network. LTE-Advanced promises significantly faster data speeds (theoretical download speeds of three gigabits per second and 1.5Gbps up); AT&T is expected to roll out its service during the second half of 2013.

I haven’t used a printer in my home for the past decade, thanks mostly to my reliance on digital smartphone and tablet screens, along with limited living space. Though paper printouts are far less valuable than they once were, there are still moments when I like to have something printed, like a backup copy of an airline reservation or a map with directions.

Most people assume they can’t print from a tablet or smartphone because their printers are older and/or aren’t equipped with Wi-Fi capability. This week, I took a closer look at two of the many free consumer-oriented solutions seeking to put that myth to rest: Presto (formerly FingerPrint) by Collobos Software and ThinPrint Cloud Printer by Cortado. They make printing from mobile devices as simple as hitting print on a computer.

Both can print documents from various mobile devices, though Presto is currently limited to working with printers connected to Windows PCs. ThinPrint printers can be connected to Windows PCs or Macs. A Mac version of Presto is expected in August. (Each comes in an enterprise version that costs money and is geared toward office environments.)

These solutions use a sneaky workaround: They work as if they’re simply sending a print job to a computer — and the computer can then print the job because it’s already set up to work with a printer. For example, I press Print on my iPad to get a paper copy of an important email, and the email prints out seconds later because the computer I’ve set to work with Presto or ThinPrint is associated with that printer.

If this concept sounds familiar, that’s because there are existing options from big-name companies that work with and without PCs acting as go-betweens for mobile devices and printers. But these options have their own caveats.

H-P’s ePrint solution enables wireless printing from devices, but only to H-P printers. Apple’s AirPrint solution works with more than 700 printer models from more than a dozen manufacturers, but is limited to Apple’s iOS devices like the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Google’s Cloud Print is confined to items sent from the Google Chrome Web browser, Chrome OS or Google mobile apps like Gmail and Google Docs.

I found Presto worked more consistently and in more scenarios where people might want to print something. Examples included photos of my newborn nephew, important emails and Web pages from home-decorating websites that I wanted to save. It has built-in support for Google’s Cloud Print, which is handy when printing documents from Google apps (like Gmail or the Chrome mobile browser), Android or the Chrome operating system. This was easy to enable by entering my Cloud Print account credentials in the “Namespaces” tab during setup.

The catch with Presto Home, which is the name of the free version, is that mobile devices can successfully print only to PCs that are running on the same network. For example, my iPad had to be running on the same Wi-Fi network as my Windows 8 PC to print everything out. The Enterprise version of Presto, which costs $30 a month, offers a workaround for this. Another roadblock: If your PC is turned off, like a closed laptop, Presto can’t run.

I downloaded Presto from store.collobos.com to my Windows 8 PC and walked through a few quick steps to get it started. Once this was installed, my devices automatically found the printer (previously set up to work with the PC) as a destination option when printing materials. Presto is compatible with iOS, Android and Google’s Chrome OS.

Meanwhile, ThinPrint is focused more on being a solution for people who use a smartphone or tablet for work-related tasks. It won’t print emails or Web pages, nor does it integrate with Google Cloud Print. But it does print photos quite easily via an app that opens your device’s photos on iOS or Android.

This free app is available in the Apple App Store or Google Play store and must be installed on your mobile device. It offers instructions on downloading a program for a Windows PC or Mac from cloudcentral.cortado.com. Presto avoids needing an app because of its integration with AirPrint and Google Cloud Print.

Unlike the free version of Presto, the free version of ThinPrint lets people print from their iOS or Android devices from wherever they are, so they don’t have to be using the same network as the associated computer. This means if you’re wandering around town and snap a print-worthy photo, you can send it to your printer (through the cloud) using ThinPrint. When you get home, the memorable printouts will be there waiting. If your computer is turned off, the job is held in the cloud and printed the next time that machine is turned on.

Printing isn’t as necessary in our everyday lives as it once was, thanks to mobile devices. It’s often hard to even find the command that sends a document to the printer. But for those rare, vital moments when you just need something on paper, Presto and ThinPrint offer smart solutions.

Email Katie at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

---

Corrections & Amplifications

An earlier version of the Digital Solution had a reference to ThinPrint Cloud Printer that incorrectly said it can print emails.

Will Windows 8.1 be better than Windows 8? Yes. Better than Windows 7? No, not really.

Microsoft said Monday that its forthcoming update to Windows 8 will be ready for PC makers by late August in order to ensure that holiday PCs will have the new software.

Windows 8.1 is designed to address some key critiques of Windows 8, including adding back a start screen, improving the mail app and making the shift from modern apps and classic Windows software less jarring.

The news came at the start of the company’s annual partner conference, which is taking place this week in Houston.

Microsoft delivered a preview version of Windows 8.1 last month, and said the final version of the software will come as a free update later this year.

Some people are afraid of spiders. Others are afraid of robots. Heaven help the person afraid of both who stumbles upon this creepy-crawly 3D-printed robotic spider from Robugtix.

The T8 is made nightmare-inducing not only by its 3D-printed and somewhat realistic-looking skin but by the preternatural movements that mimic living eight-leggers. According to Robugtix, that’s thanks largely to the company’s “Bigfoot” inverse kinematics engine, which uses math calculations to figure out how the robot-arachnid should move.

Using 26 servo motors and a wireless RF-based connected remote control, the 2.2 lbs robot is not exactly autonomous, but when you send it in a direction, it figures out how to walk that creepy way. Read more...

More about Robots, Spider, 3d Printing, Tech, and Gadgets

Futurist Thomas Frey: In 1791 when Mozart died, his 29-year-old wife, Constanze Weber, was forced to earn a living, so she began selling her late husband’s manuscripts and turned the former messy paper scraps lying around the house into a tidy income stream.     Lucky for her, she lived after Gutenberg’s printing revolution had [...]

For years, Microsoft tried to get a full-blown version of Windows on small screens. The concept worked marginally well on netbooks but less so on the 7-inch UMPCs, or Ultra Mobile Personal Computers, in the mid- to late-2000s. Now, with Windows 8 and its Metro or modern user interface, Microsoft is trying again with its hardware partners. Acer is among the first out of the gate with a product, the $379 Iconia W3 8-inch tablet, and I received a review unit earlier this week. I can already see vast improvements over prior attempts at Windows on the small screen.

I spent much of the July 4 holiday using the device, which is actually a $429 version; the extra $50 boosts the storage capacity from 32 GB to 64 GB. Acer also sent an optional $69 Bluetooth keyboard that doubles as a both a stand and type of carrying case for the small slate. Here are my  impressions in no particular order:

• The 8-inch tablet is solidly built and shares design elements from Acer’s larger Windows 8 tablets such as the W510. You can’t flex the device due to a solid body (likely polycarbonate) but the back is all plastic meant to look like metal.
• At 8 inches, the 1280 x 800 display provides a decent 188 pixels per inch, yet some text and images appear grainy and not so crisp. It could be the fonts or font sizes used by default, but the viewing experience is marginal to my eyes: not terrible nor impressive. The screen is not an IPS panel, so viewing angles aren’t the best either. Screen brightness is quite good except in full sunlight.
• Because of the resolution, the W3 doesn’t support snapping apps in Windows; you can’t run two apps on the screen at the same time unless you connect the tablet to an external monitor of 1366 x 768 resolution or greater.
• Instead of a capacitive Windows button under the screen when in landscape, Acer used a physical button that’s off to the right in this orientation. Holding the tablet in portrait mode puts the button under the screen, but I find myself using Windows 8 in landscape far more often. I suspect most others do, or will do, the same. Windows 8 screen gestures all work great.
• The device’s two speakers also suffer from what I call “portrait-itis”: When holding the tablet in landscape, both speakers are on the right side of the unit. I’d like to see Acer add a third speaker to offset this. The speakers aren’t very loud either.
• For a tablet of this size, I think you get a fair amount of ports and interfaces: micro USB, micro HDMI and micro SD memory card slot, in addition to the expected power port and headphone jack.
• Battery life is rated for 7 to 8 hours and, although I’ve only had the unit a short time, I was able to use it continuously for 5 hours with juice to spare. I think the run-time claims are accurate.
• The 1.5 GHz Intel Atom chip is helping in the battery department: this chipset is used in Acer’s Iconia W510 tablet, which gets similar battery life. There are 2 GB of memory, which is standard for the Atom-powered Windows 8 devices on the market.
• Likewise, performance on the W3 is similar to the larger Atom-powered tablets currently available. That makes sense since the guts of this 8-inch tablet are mostly the same as its larger siblings. It’s certainly not as fast a Windows 8 machine running an Intel Core chip, but it’s at least as fast as Windows RT machines. And unlike those devices, you can install any Windows application you like on the W3.
• The device has two cameras — front and rear — and I can’t say that either impressed me. I’d use the front camera for video chatting but the rear sensor is sub-par.
• I’m still not a fan of jumping between the Windows Desktop for full Windows apps and the modern user interface for touch-friendly apps. That’s more of an issue with Windows itself, not the W3 tablet, and is due to some personal preference on my part.
• Microsoft Office is pre-installed, which is a big value for those that need it.
• Using the Desktop mode is a bit of a challenge, at least for me, because it’s not optimized for touch and everything is a bit smaller in a screen of this size. You can modify the DPI scaling (I find 150 percent to work well) and even the size of Windows elements, such as title bars and scroll bars, but I think Acer should optimize these out of the box.
  
• The touch apps I used all worked well on the small slate, offering the same experience as a full-sized Windows 8 or Windows RT computer.
• I want to like the keyboard, but have a major issue with it. It’s easy to pair with the tablet; I like the feel and layout of the keys. And it’s nearly a full-sized keyboard. There’s a slot to prop up the tablet on the keyboard that works fine… until you start tapping at the tablet screen. That’s quite often since this is a touchscreen device. When closing apps — swiping from top to bottom on the display — the tablet would often fall out of the keyboard. And as I tapped the display with regular use, each little tap dislodged it a little more from the rubber keyboard grip, eventually causing the W3 to tip over. Perhaps it’s me or a defective unit, but this doesn’t seem well-designed.
• I do like how the tablet clips in to the back of the keyboard, making it easier to carry while protecting the screen.

If you like or mostly use Metro style apps and don’t mind limited performance, I suggest considering the W3 tablet. The 1.1 pound device measures in at 8.62 x 5.31 x 0.45 inches, so it’s easy to tote around. And it runs the full version of Windows 8 with support for legacy Windows software. Is it a super-fast performer or a premium device? No, but starting at $379, I think many will find it a great value for the price, given all Windows capabilities.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• A look back at mobile in the third quarter

The European Parliament voted in favor of a resolution that would back the Commission should it wish to suspend data sharing agreements with the U.S., such as the passenger name records system, in light of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency.

Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer has been snapping up companies so quickly that it’s almost hard to keep track of them all: in just the past week alone, deals have been announced for three companies — Qwiki, something called BigNoggin and Xobni — with a total cost estimated at more than $100 million.

Xobni, an email inbox-management service that has been around since 2006, was Mayer’s most recent purchase, with an estimated price tag somewhere between $30 million and $60 million. But beneath the shopping spree, is there a strategy that ties these acquisitions together?

One obvious answer is mobile, something Mayer said early on would be a major focus for the company as it tried to revitalize its faded business: of the 17 acquisitions that Yahoo has announced since she took over the chief executive job, many have something to do with mobile. Qwiki, for example — which the company bought for an estimated $50 million earlier this week — is a service that allows users to create videos on their phones

Trying to play catch up

Other purchases, however — such as the $1-billion acquisition of Tumblr, and even the acquisition of Xobni itself — aren’t as obviously about mobile. The Tumblr deal seemed to be designed at least in part to restore some luster to Yahoo’s reputation as a cool web company, and to try and generate more traffic for its advertising properties.

Xobni is clearly meant to help Yahoo’s mail product improve, and yet the company has also been languishing on the sidelines of the tech sector for some time now (as has Qwiki). To some extent, that deal seems to be about trying to catch up with Microsoft and Google on features.

That’s one of the problems with many of Yahoo’s acquisitions: they seem to be attempts by Mayer to get Yahoo caught up to other major players, and that’s a strategy that rarely comes with a big payoff. Is the addition of Xobni going to cause dramatically large numbers of people to switch to Yahoo Mail, or to remain with Yahoo Mail instead of switching to Google or some other service?

At worst, this kind of approach could easily create a sort of “Franken-Yahoo” with disparate parts that fit together but don’t work very well.

Adding services like Qwiki, meanwhile, could generate some more heat and light for Yahoo’s mobile efforts, and so could acquisitions like the news-summarization app Summly, which Yahoo paid an estimated $30 million for — despite a complete lack of any revenue, let alone any profits. But at the same time, the frenzy of deals seems to be more like a scattershot “buy anything that says mobile in its feature set” approach than one that is guided by an overall vision of what Yahoo wants to be on phones and tablets.

Can acquisitions change Yahoo’s DNA?

As Om pointed out recently, Mayer has the luxury of a deep pocketbook with which to finance her spending spree: Alibaba, the Chinese portal that Yahoo owns a 23-percent stake in, has continued to increase in value to the point where it could be worth as much as $100 billion, and that — plus some hopes for improved performance based on Mayer’s arrival — has helped Yahoo’s stock price improve over the past six months. So the acquisition binge could well continue for the foreseeable future.

Yahoo has suggested that many of its acquisitions have been about acqui-hiring smart developers and entrepreneurs that it can add to its staff, presumably as a way of injecting some fresh blood into the company and its businesses.

However, Om has also argued in the past that even Mayer and her acquisitions will likely prove to be incapable of changing Yahoo’s core DNA, a cultural miasma that has stymied the efforts of several CEOs before her and made the company a synonym for snatching failure from the jaws of victory. Can the former Googler stitch together the startups she has acquired into something approaching a winning strategy? That remains a rather large question mark.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Getty Images

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Flash analysis: the future of Yahoo
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them

According to no less an authority than the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), so-called “subsidized handsets” don’t generally work out to be cheaper. Yes, that “free” phone you get when you sign up to a two-year contract isn’t actually free — I know, it’s like discovering Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

Cynicism aside, though, it’s nice to have some hard evidence that this is the case. Some upstart operators have previously characterized these subsidies as bad loans (the contract price simply goes up too much), and there is indeed already a growing trend in Europe for carriers to drop subsidies in favor of more transparent leasing and financing schemes. T-Mobile USA made a similar leap back in March.

These carriers have their own motives for doing so – it makes it easier to sell pay-as-you-go phones, for one thing – but the consumer also stands to benefit. The OECD study tells us why.

In a blog post on Thursday, Agustin Diaz-Pines of the organization’s Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry argued that “handset subsidy” is a misleading term that should be replaced by references to “bundling”. The OECD compared the total cost of ownership of a phone-plus-contract bundle with that of a separate device and contract:

“For those countries where both options exist, such as in France or the United States, the report concludes that the bundled option (with discounted smartphone) was, on average, between $10 and $20 a month more expensive than the BYOD option. Of course, these differences may depend on other aspects, such as the quality of the network or additional customer service. It is, however, of concern that these differences are not always made evident to consumers.”

The logic is simple: more transparency leads to more competition, which in turn sees more fat trimmed from consumers’ bills. The post also calls for more reasonable contract terms and the promotion of phone unlocking, as a way to help people switch when their provider is overcharging.

Interestingly, Diaz-Pines pointed out that the actual cost of the smartphone was a relatively small part of the total cost of ownership – between 6-24 percent, “depending on consumption patterns”. He praised operators in countries such as Australia and Italy for clearly marking in customers’ monthly bills how much is for the device and how much for the service. (You see the same thing happening in Germany and the UK now, too.)

The OECD isn’t saying bundling is a bad thing — in fact, it praises the simultaneous sale of devices and services for accelerating the proliferation of smartphones. It’s just saying the division of costs should be more transparent and people should be given more freedom to switch carrier. I can’t sum it up more succinctly than Diaz-Pines did: “At the end of the day, it’s all about competition and consumer empowerment.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

On July 4, a coalition of Internet activists is planning to protest National Security Agency surveillance with a campaign designed to splash the text of the Fourth Amendment (which protects against “unreasonable searches”) across thousands of sites.

The online protest is being organized by the Internet Defense League, a group that helped create a high-profile Web blackout in 2012 to protest the SOPA copyright bill that Congress eventually dropped.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Yahoo might be looking to take over your mobile phone from every possible angle, including where you store your contacts.

Germany is one of the most privacy conscious nations in the world, with data and privacy laws stronger than any other in the EU. And amid the NSA spying scandal, the country's top security chief has warned users to simply avoid U.S. companies. Will that work?

And here you were worried about your e-mail inbox. How's that for big data?

The European Parliament will vote — ironically of all days, on U.S. Independence Day on July 4 — whether existing data sharing agreements between the two continents should be suspended, following allegations that U.S. intelligence spied on EU citizens.

Boxee has gotten its buyer.

Samsung just confirmed in a statement to AllThingsD that the Korean electronics giant has acquired the Israel- and New York-based maker of set-top boxes.

“Samsung has acquired key talent and assets from Boxee,” a spokesperson for Samsung said. “This will help us continue to improve the overall user experience across our connected devices.”

Boxee’s quest to find a buyer — or raise another big round of funding — was reported two weeks ago by AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka. A representative from the company confirmed the buy-out and said the company would issue a statement later this week.

The startup, which is led by Avner Ronen, first launched as a software platform that allowed users to stream TV content and other video to their PCs. In November of 2010, it produced a hardware box, in collaboration with D-Link, that connected to TV sets to stream the same content to TVs.

Due in part to the relatively new existence of set-top boxes for Internet video, but also due to the company’s approach to its product, Boxee raised the ire of cable companies and proponents of the traditional cable industry, who were skittish about premium programming being streamed on the Web.

Over the past few years, Boxee has failed to gain as much traction in the set-top box market as Apple TV and Roku have — which basically split the U.S. market in half, according to the NPD Group.

Last October, Boxee launched a new, cloud-based DVR box that also promised to transmit unencrypted cable — a nod to the draw of over-the-air programming — despite Boxee’s insistence over the past few years that consumers were cutting the cord and turning to the Web.

As Kafka reported, Boxee has raised around $30 million since 2008. First reports about the Samsung acquisition put the buying price at $30 million, which, if accurate, makes this deal not exactly sweet for Boxee.

Its most recent funding round was more than two years ago, when it picked up $16.5 million.

For Samsung, acquiring Boxee’s assets could potentially bolster Samsung’s home-entertainment offerings, as consumers slowly but surely transition to “smart” Internet-connected TVs.